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Encounter Design
How do I design encounters for my group of characters? Balancing Encounters and the Challenge Rating System You really don’t need to understand the Challenge Rating system to balance encounters. The math behind the balancing encounters can be done for you by encounter generators. https://kobold.club/fight/#/encounter-builder is widely considered the best encounter builder tool for 5e. An encounter builder can be used just by plugging in number of players and the parties average level and how challenging you want the fight to be from easy to deadly. This will give you experience points for a selection of appropriate encounters and you can then tailor the encounter as you wish. Note: When is a deadly encounter deadly? When the PCs are out of resources, like class feature abilities, spells and recovery resources like potions. You are really not constrained by what the generator plunks out, and here’s how to modify it. For look and feel of the monsters, feel free to change this. This makes them less readily identifiable and adds a aura of this is a big world with things you may not be recognized as a player. Action Economy How do I balance an encounter to be challenging but not kill the players follows this concept of Action Economy. Who has more actions in a round. If the players do they have a significant advantage and if the monsters to they have the advantage. The side with more actions can do more to the side that doesn't and can recover from setbacks easier. So even if you balance out the HP and the Attacks and Damage of an encounter if the monster side has more attacks than players the PCs will have a hard time. Because monster side simply has more options and if the players start losing there’s a death spiral where that side has even more options for pressing it’s advantage. Other aspects of balancing encounters Due to another core tenant of 5e rules design, bounded accuracy, bonuses don’t get all that high in 5e. In previous editions of the game, you could have swings of up to 25 points between 1st and 20th level characters. So that orc you fought at first level literally can’t hit a 20th level character. This isn’t the case for 5e. bonuses only increase a relatively small amount between 1st and 20th level, base proficiency bonus starts at 2 and ends at 6 at 20th. So due to this relatively small range of numbers “the bounded accuracy range”. The same orc at 1st if you fight 30 of them at 20th still pose a credible challenge. So what makes an encounter tougher is really just how much damage the monster does, how many hp it has, and special abilities and if there are enough of them to have more actions that PC actions in a round. The dirty secret of 5e is that your actual percentage chance to save and your chance to hit remain static relative to the monsters all through your PC career. 50% chance to hit non-tank type characters, 25% chance to hit tank type characters. Saves Easy 11-13, Medium 15-16, 18+ hard. # How many HP should monsters have? ## Easier: monster HP < Heroes per monster. Harder: monster HP > Heroes per monster. ## A Solo Boss 4x to 6x what an individual fighter type character has. # Where should their roll bonuses be at? ## Generally as good as the characters # Saves ## Pick 2 stats, and it gets the same proficiency bonus are characters +1 or +2, otherwise it's a straight roll with +1 or +2 # Damage ## Look at what the players are doing for damage. ## Easier: damage < heroes, Harder: damage > heroes. # Special Abilities ## Does this ability degrade their ability to fight beyond just damage? If yes then this is a harder encounter because regardless of all other prevailing balance points because the longer the fight goes on the worse it gets for player characters.